Tong Kunniao’s painting practice is undergoing a transformation. Prior to this, his works predominantly drew imagery from his own installations, often employing physical structures as the mode of display for the paintings. On one hand, this grafting of easel painting and three-dimensional installation, along with the juxtaposition of traditional ink-and-wash techniques on silk with bizarre, viewer-facing contraptions, generated a profound sense of absurdity and contrast in Tong Kunniao’s paintings. On the other hand, as mechanical devices became frames for the paintings and tangible forms entered the two-dimensional canvas, the dual creative threads of painting and installation art also converged into a coherent logic that runs consistently through his work.
However, in Tong Kunniao’s recent paintings, while traces of his installations can still be found embedded within the pictorial space, they are now—as exemplified in works like Untitled—struck into the very fibers of the silk, driven to the backstage of this vibrant performance like moles in a whack-a-mole game, hammered down by an oversized mallet that symbolizes the artist’s subjectivity. The humanoid forms of the installations thus merge with the blue-green landscapes, each generating the other. They give faces to the mountains, unsettle the serene and celebrated literati scenes under the gaze of an “eye from another mountain,” and transform the gentle vitality and rhythmic flow of classical painting into sharp, spasmodic sensations—like the stirring of long-dwelling parasites within the belly.
*The text is excerpted from The Other's Eye—Tong Kunniao‘s “Painting Machine” by Zhang Chen
